Unwrapping link's redirection with R and Shiny

There are public portals like WhereGoes where you introduce a link and they show you all the hopes the request does. Normally, because the URL is shortened, the original link is not secure (http) or it has trackers in between.

The idea and the development is easy: use the request R package and visualize the information with shiny.

So from that born Redirect CheckeR. It can be use in several ways.

View with a Shiny webpage, locally from any IDE #

Download the app.R file from the repository and execute the R script. Then access to localhost:3838 and play!

Deploying as a Docker container, to access anywhere #

Clone the repository, edit the ports if needed in docker-compose.yml, and deploy with docker compose up -d or using your container manager like Portainer. Then access to the IP of the host you’re running this container at + the port you’ve mapped, and you’re ready to go!

Using it as a function, displaying the output in the terminal (not available yet) #

remotes::install.github("myanesp/redirect-checkR")

library(redirect-checkR)

url <- http://google.es

get_redirections(url)